From this pickaxe on, the story was entirely new to the screen, and much of it new to the audience.
Kelly then built himself a cell in Heaven out of old and broken fragments of forgotten palaces in the far jungles. There he wrote The Golden Book for our little city far below. By day he lived as that boy of Springfield who grew up as Saint Scribe of the Shrines, and established the discipline and ritual of The One Hundred Shrines of the World. He was rumored among a few of us to be the reincarnation of Hunter Kelly. He became the first teacher of St. Friend, who wore his mantle well after him. And now he is pictured, in many a dazzling flame-like color, throwing down from the window of his cell in heaven, this very hour of All Saint’s Day, The Golden Book of Springfield.
All this is the first intimation to Gwendolyn Charles that stranger things than we know may happen in heaven and on earth. As the wonder upon the screen moves on, with no formula of orthodox religion, and indeed with a sense of humor, like the laughter of the skies, she understands not what world she is in, and the lovely hedonist and artist is shaken with the passions of the mystic St. Catharine of Sienna.
She is concerned to know that in the box of the projecting machine is a dazzling presence, a sort of giant fairy, a little larger than a man, an operator, indeed, one she has not hired. There is an orchestra of giant fairies, who play such tunes as blue bells should give forth in the wild woods.
And meantime, according to her tale, the book is there, pictured on the screen, circling around the domes and towers of Rabbi Terence Ezekiel’s heretical synagogue on east Mason Street. And so the Rabbi makes haste to that place, and a few friends follow. But many people in the audience of quite different faiths declare that those are their own church steeples and not his temple towers, and hasten to the houses of their belief. Which is not so strange, to one who has been in a law court, for there it is demonstrated that a witness is somewhat apt to see and remember what he desires to see and remember. And so each finds the book where he has faith to find it.
The Doubter is the next member of our club to testify and he tells of the midnight visions he has already described to me.
He is reborn as Mayo Sims, physician of all the great saints and sinners in the town. Incidentally he is the political ally of the Rock and Kopensky families, people obscure in 1920, since they are but tenants on his farms, but in 2018 in the city government, along with the tribe of Cave Man Thomas and others.
The physician tells first to me, then to the rest of the group of forecasters, that he has seen how the book with all its chronicles and exhortations, rituals and parables, is utterly rejected by the mass of the citizens of the Mystic Year. They refuse to let the pages draw conclusions for them from the past or move them with hopes for the future. According to his tale the volume raises a faction of desperate malcontents, whose business, beside fomenting strikes, is to sing in a particularly nasal whine. Some of the rank and file of this group are shot down, after the city has endured five days of hideous “racket,” and more hideous vocal music. There is no magic ballad or hymn in the air.
There is but one copy of the book, “thanks be.” It is full of sedition, and therefore tabooed, but dog-eared from being much passed around in secret. To be sure it has a cheap gilt paper cover. It is captured and carried ten miles east of the city by certain friends of law and order, members of the Rock and Kopensky families, led by Cave Man Thomas. It is dropped into an abandoned coal-shaft. It goes down like lead. It has no wings. It was written by hair-brained sociologists, some of the wild ones from the absurd University of Springfield, not by “practical business men.”
It is not rescued, from the shaft. The writers of the work go back to their legitimate teaching, and are heard from never again.